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Kafunsho already?
The hayfever forecast says we are only barely feeling the effects of cedar pollen, but my body is ramping up with itchy eyes, a sore throat and sneezes. Even my skin itches already! Gone are the years when my allergies were still tuned to the pollen of Pennsylvania. I am fully allergic to spring in…
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Strawberry Fields Forever
Ichigo-gari with Heather and Zio yesterday in Tochigi yielded 1.6 kg of berries. The berries are grown in long hothouses through the winter. Another month or so and strawberries will be off the local produce menu until autumn, so I am glad to have picked some this season. We’ll have frozen strawberries for summer smoothies. Tod was…
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Chika-hatsu
On a chilly Tuesday holiday you must get out of the house and go somewhere fun. So yesterday we made our way to the Subway Museum in Kasai. Riding the subways every day, you get to love them and we’ve wanted to visit the 地下博 for many years. Finally, we did and it was great.…
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Snow Day
I am delighted by today’s snowfall. It’s been drifting down since morning and about 20 cm have accumulated. This is the most snow I have ever seen in Tokyo. The city is quiet. We took a walk in the afternoon, and families were in the parks throwing snowballs, building yuki-daruma, and making kamakura snow houses.…
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Winter Hoop Dance
I joined a group on Facebook called The Hooping Game. Players are assigned songs, then have 48 hours to make a hoopdance video and post it back to the group. I got my song yesterday morning and braved the almost freezing temperatures at Yoyogi park to make my video. You may notice the orange-hatted preschoolers…
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Nice Day for a Walk
The weather was so beautiful today that once I left home, I could not stop walking. From my planned errand in Iidabashi, I decided to stroll through Kitanomaru Park,. When I ended up down by the Imperial East Gardens I walked through them, too. Then the Imperial Outer Gardens to Hibiya Park, where I called…
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Oh, ouch, amazing
I just spilled an entire glass of water and did a backroll into the login table. Wheeee! Ouch. I think I drank too much. Tod & I spent most of the day at the Furosato Matsuri 2014 Tokyo, a huge “hometown festival” in Tokyo Dome with hundreds of stalls vending food and drink from different…
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Protest in Japan
Today I went to the Diet to show my disapproval of the National Secrets bill. It’s a terrible law that would choke press freedom, allow the government to cover up anything in the name of national security, turn any issue into a matter of secret record, and even make demonstrations illegal. Bad, bad, bad. 80%…
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Happy Anniversary Adventures
Tod & I celebrated our 24th wedding anniversary in Shimobe Onsen, Yamanashi, this weekend. One night and two days neatly encapsulated two dozen years of marriage. The town is one of the 100 Famous Onsen of Japan, but nobody has heard of it. It’s a one-street village with ten hotels, four restaurants, one bar, a…
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Here come the Olympics
Tokyo’s Olympic bid for the 2020 summer games won out over Istanbul and Madrid yesterday. I am sure the Games that run in seven years’ time (July 24 – August 9, 2020) will be a success and give a boost to the local economy. Tourism will boom. Bilingual folks in Japan will have lots of…
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